page_title: Harold Gilman
section_title: Early life and studies
hierarchical_section_title: Harold Gilman / Early life and studies
caption_attribution_description: Caption from the museum The subject of a number of portraits by Harold Gilman, Mrs Mounter lodged at the same address as the artist at 47 Maple Street, off Tottenham Court Road. In this painting her direct gaze and time-worn features, highlighted in warm tones and haloed tightly by an orange kerchief, draws the viewer in. The ordinary crockery on the table indicates the unceremonious sharing of breakfast across social classes and despite wartime shortages.
context_page_description: Harold John Wilde Gilman was a British painter of interiors, portraits and landscapes, and a founder-member of the Camden Town Group.
context_section_description: Though born in Rode, Somerset, Gilman spent his early years at Snargate Rectory, in the Romney Marshes in Kent, where his father was the Rector. He was educated in Kent, Abingdon School in Berkshire, from 1885 to 1890, in Rochester and at Tonbridge School, and for one year at Brasenose College in Oxford University.
  Although he developed an interest in art during a childhood convalescence period, Gilman did not begin his artistic training until after his non-collegiate year at Oxford University (cut short by ill health) and after working in the Ukraine as a tutor to a British family in Odessa (1895).  In 1896 he entered the Hastings School of Art to study painting, but in 1897 transferred to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he remained from 1897 to 1901, and where he met Spencer Gore. In 1904 he went to Spain and spent over a year studying Spanish masters. Velázquez and Goya as well as Whistler were major early influences.
caption: Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table, 1917
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